March
17 Saints celebrating feast days today include Saint Patrick (patron saint of Ireland), Saint Joseph of Arimathea (mentioned in both "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom"), Saint Agricola, Saint Gertrude of Nivelles, Saint Paul of Cyprus, and the Martyrs of the Serapeum.
The
second most common (to me) wattles hang off the necks
The
fourth kind of wattles are trees that grow in Australia and Then, of course, there are the wattles made famous in "Ally McBeal." You can have these taken care of with plastic surgery, but then you might end up looking like Dyan Cannon (also in "Ally McBeal"). There are worse things than having wattles. Here's
a new wattle for me: rolls of straw used to control erosion. But
the OED's first definition of wattle, and one with which I was completely
unfamiliar, was "rods and stakes, interlaced with twigs or branches
of trees, used to form fences and the walls and roofs of buildings."
If you plaster mud on the sticks, then the construction is called "wattle and daub." This has already been more than anyone needs to know about wattles so, although there are still three more to go...wattle-bird, a wattle on a fish, and the wattle that is sort of a tax...I think I will just drop it now.
Onward
to March 18
|
Joseph
of Arimathea was supposed to have built a church out of wattles. Wattles?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are a heck
of a lot of different types of wattles. The kind with which I was
most familiar hang off turkey necks. They are pretty spectacular--when
the turkey (these are male turkeys we are talking about here) gets
excited for any reason, the red wattles become huge and the face turns
bright purple. Those wattles are great on a turkey, but would make
a lousy church.
